MAN AND WIFE

Father Raymond J. de Souza
Speaking of man and wife
National Post
Sat 05 Mar 2005
Page: A16
By Father Raymond J. de Souza

Want to talk to young men about how to treat their future wives with respect? Better not do that too loudly at Harvard. And you'd better not do it if you work for the Ontario government.

Harvard University recently had quite a flap over President Lawrence Summers' comments about women and science. But lest you think the Summers affair was absorbing all the equity energy on campus, you will be pleased to know that Harvard's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) has not been distracted from its speech-monitoring.

Last Saturday, the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations held its annual Cultural Rhythms show, the standard type of multicultural arts and cuisine night at which a minor celebrity is feted. This year the honouree was the actress Jada Pinkett Smith.

"I couldn't have imagined a better show," the Harvard Crimson reports Dina L. Maxwell, the show's co-director, saying. "Jada was wonderful -- so sweet. The audience loved her."

The BGLTSA was withholding its love, in response to the following outburst from Mrs. Smith: "Women, you can have it all -- a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career. They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want."

Poor Jada, who probably thought she was doing her equity bit, dismissing President Summers' musings about whether the difficulty in balancing family and work might explain the low ratio of female science professors. Little did she know that you just can't throw around inflammatory words like "loving man, devoted husband, loving children" at Harvard without attracting the attention of the BGLTSA and, one presumes, the infertile, though they haven't organized themselves into a pressure group yet.

"Some of the content was extremely heteronormative, and made BGLTSA members feel uncomfortable," said Jordan B. Woods, the BGLTSA co-chair, explaining that this language insulted some because it "narrowly defined" relationships to be male-female.

In response to the complaint, the show's organizers have pledged to "inform future speakers that they will be speaking to an audience diverse in race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender and class." Nice touch, including "class" at Harvard. It was not reported whether speakers would also be advised that their audience will include students not smart enough to draw general lessons from particular examples.

But that's being a little too hard on Harvard. One of the joys of an elite university is that you can advertise your faux intelligence by adorning your vocabulary with such ideological constructions as "heteronormative" and not be thought embarrassing. Indeed, in the last issue of the Queen's Quarterly, my Post colleague Robert Fulford gave a hilarious tour of the silliness of academic writing, in which words like "diegetic," "narratology" and "scopophilia" litter the page. In fact, Fulford nominates "heteronormativity" -- the sin of speaking as if men fall in love with women and vice versa -- as the perfect example of how alien the culture of university faculties has become.

Heteronormative nonsense on campus can be smiled at. It is not so amusing closer to home, where just days before Mrs. Smith went to Harvard, Ontario's Liberal government passed Bill 171, which extirpates the scourge of heteronormativity from the statute books. You may have missed it, as the whole thing was introduced and passed in three days, with the connivance of the feckless opposition Conservatives, sailing through on a voice vote so no MPP would have to go on the record.

As a result, there are no more references to "wives," "husbands," "widows" or "widowers," in Ontario's statutes. Bill 171 was nothing if not comprehensive -- not only the Marriage Act was amended, but 69 other statutes, including the Fuel Tax Act and the Tobacco Tax Act. The way that Ontarians have always spoken about marriage and family life is now verboten in Ontario law. The idea that homosexual marriage is just adding another form of marriage to the books, while leaving everything else the same has now been exposed for the impossibility it is. If marriage must be re-invented because it is heteronormative, then it follows that the way we speak about marriage must also be re-invented. It won't be long before the local school board bans permission forms that use heteronormative language like "mother" and "father."

With the new speakers' guidelines in place for next year, Harvard may find it harder to get a B-list celebrity who will pass muster with the BGLTSA. If they don't mind obscure politicians, they would do well to book someone from Queen's Park. They have already got the language down.